Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Bob slapped my shoulder with the back of his hand. “Let’s go help Ev finish the painting.” He finished his beer and pushed the glass to the inside edge of the bar and the bartender opened two more. Bob said, “But if you visualize yourself from behind or above with her lowering and raising her knees and hands and biting an earlobe off — I don’t mean Ev, I mean anyone — the thing as I was saying to Ben is so frigging absurd you start breaking up and almost — well I did, not so long ago. Let’s call up your friend in Trinity churchyard and ask what he’s running for. Tell him he’s between two stools; that’s it, tell him he’s between two stools,” and Bob leaned back laughing and almost tipped his tall chair over. “Call up Tracy — who’s she married to now?”

“I’ll call her and tell her to take a vacation.”

“I don’t think you really mean that.”

“What about this Father Sedgwick?” I asked — and as I hear the west elevator near me I feel all the vectors whose sensitive product I am here at a point in your measurable living room, and for a dreadful second I can’t remember what you stand for, much less what you look like. And now I don’t want to know what I said in those unstraightened pages curled at the long edges as if line by line by my script and your penpoint.

In a sententious drawl almost nasal, Bob said, “Ben’s helped us.” And as, with the strangest self-congratulatory relief, I saw in the dark varnished wood of the bar the evening years ago with Fred Eagle when I’d oversimplified the rattling, softly live and popping force-field into neat dialikes and dislikes, Bob added, “With the Robby thing too.” Mild, matter-of-fact, depleted.

“Careful,” I said, “I’ll make love to your wife.”

“Funny,” said Bob in the slow clairvoyant way that made Petty impatient, “I don’t think I could dare get mad — well, maybe I could. But don’t tell me about it.”

He didn’t ask what Robby’s letters to me contained. “I wanted to get him away last summer. Camp up on Sebago. He wouldn’t go. But when I was his age Dad tried to shovel me off one summer and I told him to stuff it.”

When I’d asked Cora’s doorman, who doesn’t really know me, to tell her about the apartment coming vacant in your building, I knew she’d pass it on to Ev and almost certainly not guess I was the one who’d given the doorman the message. But I never thought Ev would get inquisitive about my interest in your doomed configuration, Dom, and she didn’t. That was a year ago, six months before your picture-essay on toilet-bowl divination which elicited from Ev to my knowledge her one comment on you. She liked you. But does she know you live in our building? Probably no, though Bob may have learned this at Cora’s Accident which I couldn’t make. You, of course, weren’t there because you were following your Friday carouse in Harlem with a bullhorn speech around the corner outside the white poet’s store-front children’s club. You don’t need to be told all this except for my sake. I plot myself among our shifting coördinates. Speak English, says Bob, a great exponent of plaintalk, as three hundred and twenty-odd miles north he replaces Handel’s Water Music on the turntable with the opening Kyrie of the B-Minor Mass (and now fourteen-year-old Robby shrilly observes against his will that the fidelity is poor, they ought to get stereo). But I think, Dom, that this living room of yours does not shift; you and I are so much at one in our sense of the unstable present. Certainly the length of your east wall stays the same, or that part of it that seems fixed by the elegant brown tape you’ve run from the corner near my table northward to where the lintel of the wide foyer-entrance begins; you’ve run this tape just a foot below the ceiling and interrupted it midway by bold white paste-on numerals, 24’ 2”. And various equidistances also remain if I want them to, like my open-ended parabola now thickening wastefully but going on; its arc is a section of a coneful of multiplying charges but a section that doesn’t cleave the cone; ‘tis a conic section no more embodied than (for art owes science a disguise or two) the no less real Vectoral Muscle triangulinking Pons Varolii, Spinal Bulb, and (I wink not) that point (more like a line) between the two cerebral demispheres. All of which Professor Al would dismiss more briskly than he can or would wish to dismiss his eager, charmed classrooms of undergraduates when the bell ends one of his hours. Al would dismiss your published view that this handsome measurement facing me six feet above the floor is art. And in this, Bob and he might be as one. Yet Al himself today would be indirectly and politely dismissed by the mystical northern broker Bob, who on the other hand would never have let himself dismiss Al years ago the January weekend of Al’s twelfth birthday when he got pinkeye or cold feet and didn’t come down to New York to visit us after all; for in those days Bob would effortlessly and simply not have brought himself to do what now, if he and Al met, he’d be expected to do: accept Al as some species of equal.

Why wouldn’t Bob now? Is it because, unlike Bob, Al neither saves his stubs nor often even fills them in in the check book, and loves dealing his twice-applied-for Carte Blanche to charge Lobster Fra at the motel near the college he teaches at? No, not exactly. Or would it be because Al, unlike Bob, can tell the difference between Antioch theology and the more parabolic Alexandrian, yet cares about Cyril’s supposed persecution of Hypatia or Empress Eudoxia’s of golden-mouthed Chrysostom only for the reverend learning these violences sprang from.

Why wouldn’t Bob accept Al now? Because when he got around to telling Al — as ye gods he’s bound to in their midtown motel bar tonight — that if he were back today pursuing his interrupted Master’s he’d write his thesis on the figure of the Ordinary Masculine Jesus in Bonhoeffer, Beckett, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, terribly he would feel in Al’s cordial doubt the pitiless condescension of an after all in no way limbless boy from Heatsburg who once said he’d give his right arm to have gone to Harvard and who way up in some nook of his mortal soul assumes Bob could have gone as if by social fiat. Al lets nothing intrude on his Saturday morning at the new squash courts. Both Al and Bob would be as suspicious of head-shrinkers as Ted’s own doctor was of Ted’s “prepared material” when Ted was just casually talking about a guy he knows who turns on with 125 mg. antibiotic suppositories taken orally and even hourly.

How, without me, could Al and Bob ever find a way to talk about (granted) the odd (though trivial) kinships between them, like how they used to make their wives stay up with them at night till they finished their reading?

Once when Bob did his famous simulated window leap from the fifth-form study hall, “Freddy” Smith sitting as usual way at the back broke the silence with applause and a “Hear, hear” he’d picked up from his father (who played court tennis with Mr. Pound and one muggy Memorial Day said to me with arched eyebrow over bloodshot eye, “It’s as o double t as e double l” ). Well, Akkie Backus up on the podium with his Times at the sports pointed his open scissors at “Freddy” and told him to report after school to do two hundred cubes before he went home. We all forgot Bob’s leap and turned varying degrees around to laugh at “Freddy,” but because of those endless multiplications he missed his prissy twin Bill’s victory in the hundred in the dual meet that afternoon.

Sometimes, though, betraying how much of all this I recall seems to be in me merely the power not to grow up. And I wonder if my memorial dwellings are after all made out of the third little pig’s bricky-brick-bricks baked in the warm morning of self-esteem. Ev lets me alone.